Inside the cavernous conference centre on Brighton's storm-lashed seafront yesterday Nelson Mandela did exactly what he was supposed to do. Stage-managed the event may have been, but he did it in his own inimitable way.

To no one's surprise but everyone's delight he sent the Labour delegates home from their week's exertions bathed in the reflected glory of his own moral grandeur as the world's most admired politician - and possibly its most admired citizen.

He beamed, he shook small, proud hands, glad-handed the grown-ups and embraced Tony Blair. His speech contained self-indulgent flourishes about his wife, Graca, being more famous than him and how he, at 82, may even be a "stupid old man".

But its core message was as hard as a South African diamond: global solidarity for the "poor and marginalised" must be sustained in the age of global capitalism.

A secular saint he may be, but you do not dominate a liberation movement from jail without being a formidable politician too. At the outset he was careful to say how people of most political persuasions in most countries had condemned the sheer human indignity of apartheid.

But at the end he paid back his debt to Labour with a tribute to its enduring values that money could not buy. "William Hague will have a job to top that," quipped a delegate. "He'll have to invite Pinochet."